Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 into a Puritan family, but she refuses to declare her faith in public, as was require by the puritan tradition, and then she decided to interrupt her studies and she came back home. She died in 1886. She began a life of isolation and her poetry was influenced by the reading of:
- the Bible
- Shakespeare
- Milton
- the metaphysical poets
- but also of Emily Bronte and Robert Browning

However, she combined all these influences in a deeply original way. Her themes are the eternal problems of life:
- death and loss
- time, fear, sorrow, hopelessness
- God and nature (in different ways)

Especially death captured her curiosity, so she wrote from the point of view of the person dying or of a spectator. Finally, in her poems the “I” , that’s the speaking voice, becomes a bee, or a spider o a fly, or a flower…according to a vision of the world where macrocosm is fitted into microscopic structures.